Boycotts and Divestment

Not cooperating with those that oppress oneself or others is the basis behind boycott and divestment campaigns. At their heart, such efforts state that one will no longer be complicit with actions that are wrong. The targets can be directly involved with a problem—an example of which was the boycott of General Electric for its involvement in nuclear weapons production. Alternatively, the campaign can be to put pressure on a third party, such as the campaign to get Queen's University to divest its holdings in Noranda because of its operations during the Pinochet regime. They can be local, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or global, such as the ongoing call to boycott goods from China because of its occupation of Tibet. Along with the stated goal of not buying something or ending one's investment in a corporation until the demands are met is the implied promise that if the demands are met, one will return as a customer or one will once again become an investor.

While the tactic has been around for a long time, the term boycott was coined during an Irish Land League struggle. By 1879, there had been seven consecutive poor harvests. A campaign began for the redistribution of land that included such tactics as refusing to pay rent, work on the fields of English landlords, or cooperate with evictions; those who did not refuse were ostracized. One particularly brutal land agent was Captain Charles Boycott, who gave his name to this particular form of economic noncooperation.

The tactic certainly predates the Irish land struggle. One of the better-known examples was the refusal to purchase goods produced under slavery, a campaign that began in 1781 and continued for several decades. A specific focus was refusing to purchase slave-produced sugar while buying sugar produced elsewhere.

Consumer boycotts often have been called in support of labor struggles. J. P. Stevens was boycotted [Page 263]from 1976 through 1980 in a successful effort to support the right of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to organize textile plants in the southern United States. The California-based United Farm Workers have had several boycott campaigns, of various degrees of success, to push for the rights to organize and improve specific working conditions, such as elimination of the use of certain pesticides on food crops.

Corporate Accountability International, formerly called INFACT, coordinated three major consumer boycott campaigns of which two achieved substantial success. Its boycott of Nestlé in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to the company agreeing to follow World Health Organization guidelines for the sale and distribution of infant formula. In the 1990s, when Nestlé backed away from their commitments, other organizations emerged to resurrect the Nestlé boycott. In the late 1980s, INFACT took on General Electric on the issue of manufacturing components for nuclear weapons systems. By the end of the decade, General Electric had divested itself of nuclear weapons manufacturing. They have been less successful, to date, in their campaign against the tobacco giant Philip Morris, which includes a boycott of its subsidiary Kraft Foods.

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